Education and Training Series #37: Thermal Hydraulics in Liquid Metal Fast Reactors

These webinars, organised by the GIF Education and Training Working Group are streamed live monthly. The recordings and slide decks are accessible after the webinar on this website. These webinars cover a very broad range of technical and policy related topics. At the end of 2023 they have been viewed by more than 15000 people (approximately half of the views during the live streams and the other half views being of the archives on the public GIF website). In total, the GIF webinars have reached Generation IV enthusiasts, scientists, and engineers in more than 80 countries.

These webinars are organised and hosted by the GIF Education and Training Working Group (ETWG). 

Thermal-hydraulics play a determining role in the design, operation and safety of liquid-metal reactors (LMRs) cooled by sodium, lead or lead-bismuth eutectic. The strong heat transfer performance and high boiling point of liquid metal enable the use of high working temperatures without pressurization. Because no pressure vessel is needed, most reactor designs then adopt a "pool-type" primary circuit, which minimizes the potential consequences of a primary leak and provides a large reserve of thermal inertia in accidental scenarios. While these common design characteristics of LMRs have direct advantages, they are also the source of complex thermal-hydraulic phenomena with potential high impact: strong temperature gradients must be controlled to avoid thermal fatigue on reactor structures, decay heat removal in pool-type designs depends on complex natural convection patterns. In this way, many key aspects of the justification of LMRs depend on understanding and simulating complex thermal-hydraulic phenomena. This webinar provides an overview of these phenomena and the current state-of-the-art for simulating them.